Max Casero (They/Them)

Change and transition can be so challenging: fear, anxiety, excitement. What do I let go? What do I get to keep? What can the future look like? How do I get there? During my time working in foster care, part of my responsibility was writing a 10-week life skills curriculum for LGBTQIA+ youth who were preparing to age out of the system; this curriculum used the evidence-based Transition Framework, which I have continued to employ with my own client with great success.

LGBTQ issues are broad and complicated. Impacted by race, socioeconomic status, religion, geography, culture, etc. I view my role as looking at the broader picture and working with my clients to discover how they can integrate their various identities into a more comfortable whole.

As a non-binary person, it took a lot of research and trying on different gender identities and terms to come to an understanding of who I am and where I fit in the complicated and diverse gender spectrosphere. My work with folks who are exploring their own gender identities falls in providing the space for them to try on and process all the options they may want in a safe and nonjudgmental space. I also provide support letters for medical transition.

As someone who got an adult ADHD diagnosis, I understand first-hand how neurodivergence impacts every aspect of your life. Sometimes it feels like the diagnosis is a missing puzzle piece to your past, and other times you want to grieve for how difficult things were because something was always off. Together, we explore how ADHD manifests for you - how it impacts all aspects of your life. We identify systems and solutions that are already working and build on them to create sustainable change.

I love DBT, and it's probably the modality that I use the most. I'm not here for the acronyms and I think it could use some reorganization, but time after time, it's always helpful in a pinch. I love that dialectics embraces the AND, which for me, is the acknowledgment of how wonderfully complicated humans can be. Basically, we can hold or contain two opposing or contradictory ideas or feelings AND both can be true. DBT teaches us how to manage the dissonance and discomfort in the in-between.

Motivational Interviewing is exactly what it sounds like - it's a way of asking questions that increases your likelihood for positive change. MI uses a core assumption from restorative practices: you already have everything needed for positive change. The idea is that this method of questioning elicits reasons for change that you've already been considering and simply gets you thinking about them and talking about them more, creating a plan, and then problem-solving identified obstacles .

Therapy is all about relationships and communication: relationships with ourselves, with our partners, attachment figures, with our communities, with our environments. And communication is the primary way we interact with all of those entities. Nonviolent communication is a specific and mindful way of speaking that requires emotional identification and vocabulary, self regulation, attunement, and trust. Ultimately, it's a method of communication that will improve all of your relationships.